Restoring Preferences in Tiger 10.4.11

[Tautuna]

Hi

We had a client who had a problem with Ical crashing everytime he tried to open it. So I created a test user to check whether the same problem occurs and it did not. I figured that it is then some preference on the main account that is causing the problem. Created a folder on the desktop and named it "Prefs" and dragged the contents of the preferences folder into that folder and then logged out and back in. Opened ical and got the same problem so I thought and archive and install would be the solution to the problem,but the client did not have his original disks and so that was no done. I then dragged the contents of the prefs folder back into~/username/library/preferences folder.Restarted the machine and instead of getting back to the original configuration after startup there a completely different desktop,lost items in the dock,lost all e-mails and e-mail settings and could not connect to the internet.

I verified and repaired disk permissions and the disk from disk utlity, Ran fsck -fy from single user mode,reset PRAM and NVRAM all to no avail.

Please help as the client has all his business contacts in the address book.

Thanks

[Giaguara]

Mail.app becomes angry when you remove mail preference files for it.
What would probably have been enough would have been (while iCal not running) deleting ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ical.plist, and restaring iCal. Was the prefs folder you first touched [hd]/Library/Preferences or ~/Library/Preferences?
In [hd]/Users folder, are there any extra users now? (to eliminate accidentally renaming the user's home folder)
AddressBook data should still be present, as it's stored in ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook.

[Tautuna]

Hi Giagura

The first preferences folder I touched is the ~/library/preferences. There are no extra users in the users folder.

Thanks for the response